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Felix Moran
In Worrals Down Under, Felix Moran was an Adelaide-based opal dealer who, with his partners, the prospectors Joe Barola, Luke Raffety and Yoka, were the chief adversaries for Worrals and co. in the book. Moran entered the scene about a year and a half to two years before the events in the book. Janet Marlow's aunt Mary Carter had found an opal on her farm at Wallabulla. Eager to get it valued, she asked her lawyer Harding for advice. Harding recommended Moran. This, he explained to Worrals later, was not because he knew Moran personally, but because Moran seemed to handle most of the large opal transactions in the area. Harding was not to know that Moran was a dishonest broker. Upon seeing Mary's gem, he instructed his partners Joe Barola and co. to attempt to frighten her away from her property. When this did not work, he instructed them to "get rid of" her in one way or another. Unfortunately for Moran, perhaps, Barola took this literally and poisoned Mary. As Worrals would later analyse, this defeated their purposes as the secret of her opal find died with her. Moran tried to bribe constable Dan Terry to locate Mary's servant Charlie but he had disappeared. When Worrals and Frecks turned up at Wallabulla with Janet Marlow, Moran realised that he had to take a more active role. The efforts by Barola and co. to scare them away had failed and Yoka had been killed in a confrontation with Charlie who had emerged from hiding. Moran flew up to Oodnadatta where he was collected by Raffety and driven to Wallabulla. There, Moran ordered Barola and Raffety to exhume Mary's grave (probably in order to prevent an autopsy revealing the truth about the poisoning). This failed because the grave was a fake. When Joe Barola accidentally poisoned himself by carelessly drinking some water in which he had himself planted strychnine, Raffety wanted to drive his partner to Oodnadatta for medical help. Moran at first refused and this led to a bitter argument. Moran finally agreed but the delay might have been what was fatal: Barola died before they could get very far. However, Moran and Raffety had managed to capture Charlie on the road. They returned to Wallabulla and demanded that Janet Marlow hand over the title deeds to the property. Moran then had Raffety add sugar to the girls' aircraft fuel, hoping they would try to run away and die in an aircrash. Worrals however discovered this and replied with a counterploy, faking an aircraft after flying on her still uncontaminated gravity tank. With the girls out of the picture (so he thought), Moran and Raffety gouged a sack full of opal (they had seized a paper from Charlie--a map Mary Carter had intended to pass to Janet). Their plans were interrupted by the arrival of constable Dan Terry and his tracker Sooty. Moran and Raffety escaped with their sack of opals and drove away in their car but Worrals and Terry devised a plan to overtake them by air and then ambush them on the road. After they had been stopped by Terry at the road block, both Moran and Raffety tried shoot their way out. After Moran had been wounded by Terry, he offered to surrender. He said he could explain everything and tried to incriminate Barola and Raffety in the murder of Mary. Raffety, who was wounded on the ground nearby, overhead this and shot him dead for trying to double-cross him and his friend. Category:People Category:Worrals characters